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Sauce

Mushroom Ketchup or Catsup

A fermented mushroom sauce made with salt, cloves, peppercorns, and allspice, boiled and bottled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mushroom Ketchup or Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the liquid

  1. Crush the peeled mushrooms to a pulp.

  2. Mix in 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt for every quart of mushrooms.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

  4. Drain off the liquid.

Simmer and bottle

  1. Add 20 cloves, 30 black peppercorns, and 30 allspice berries to the liquid.

  2. Boil gently for 5 hours.

  3. Bottle and cork when cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mushroom + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Mushroom + allspicetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together717 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Large field mushrooms
Provide the main liquid and savoury flavour once crushed and salted.
Coarse sea salt
Draws liquid out of the mushrooms and preserves the mixture.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 5 hours. A gentle simmer concentrates the liquid slowly and blends the spices without scorching. A hard boil can burn the sugars and make the ketchup bitter.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, clove):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Allspicethe original
  3. Cinnamonfits less well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, clove. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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